Recruitment is the starting point of most HR activities and is an age-old activity that most organizations need to conduct to sustain and grow their business. Attracting and retaining talent continues to be a challenge for most companies even today. Businesses have always looked at using the existing technology tools to be able to attract, assess, and hire the best talent available for their business. 

If you are particularly interested in getting a nice infographic on history of recruitment technology then you may click here.

It’s no surprise that within the HR Tech space, Recruitment Tech; is one of the most crowded places today and continues to attract a lot of attention from both HR Tech entrepreneurs and investors. 

Over the years the recruitment technology has evolved from print media ads to now social media playing an important role in the entire recruitment process. The recruitment technology can be looked at from external & internal perspective. 

External: 

1. What do I do to attract relevant talent for my organization?
   
   
2. What technology platforms and tools do I use to ensure that my employee value proposition is effectively and efficiently presented to my target audience at the point of contact?
   
   
3. How do I engage my prospective employee in a meaningful interaction to ensure that I help them with the application process?
   
   

These are some of the questions that organizations routinely ask and look for solutions for the same when they are looking at recruitment from an external perspective. 

Internal:

1. How do I manage the inflow of applications & ensure that the same is processed effectively & efficiently internally?
   
   
2. How do I track & monitor progress and evaluate performance of my recruitment team or function?
   
   
3. How do I manage the candidate experience and expectations with my internal realities while ensuring the process is robust to give me quality candidates for the designated roles?
   
   
4. How do I engage my existing employees in my recruitment process? How do I track, monitor, & reward employees for their participation?
   
   
5. How do I make the process of movement within organization across departments for my internal talent easy & effective?
   
   

These are some of the questions that organizations continue to seek answers to and increasing are turning to technology solutions for most of these aspects. 

The good news is there is a solution for almost all of these aspects and the solutions available vary from “point solutions”, which solve a particular problem really well, to a suite of solutions stitched together to create a specific experience for both candidates and your recruiters. 

We will now look at the various categories of recruitment technologies that are currently available in the market. In this list, we have tried to categorize various companies both Indian and global, based on the primary function they perform in the recruitment space. 

The idea here is to represent the various categories that exist today while not claiming this to be an exhaustive list of all solution providers across the globe or India. 

The Recruitment Technology Space:

The Challenge

As you can see the marketplace is bursting with solutions of different types and with varying degree of complexities and coolness associated with them. ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) mostly remain the heart of all recruitment automation efforts and companies would typically start with that. 

Certain solutions like the sourcing technologies have traditionally been used independently with or without an ATS. However now more & more organizations want an integrated view in their ATS of various sources of recruitment and thus integration of sourcing platforms including social media is fast becoming the norm. 

Today you may find companies who use different solutions for different needs with or without integrating the solutions to create a unified internal view. This gives rise to specialized recruitment analytics platform which then help companies integrate all this data together to generate analytics to help decision making process. This space is fairly untapped right now and one can expect to see a lot of action here in time to come. Embedded analytics in each of the point solutions is currently the norm and will definitely be a standard feature in time to come. 

So the key questions that the business leader and HR leader need to ask themselves while evaluating recruitment technology solutions are:

1. What is my key need? What specific business problem/s I am trying to solve?
   
   
2. What is my roadmap for the recruitment function in general & technology in particular?
   
   
3. How would this technology implementation impact the way my recruitment team is organized currently?
   
   
4. Which solution seems to be best suited to my industry and company size?
   
   
5. Would the solution fit into my current process seamlessly? Or would I have to “upgrade” my processes to meet the requirements of the solution?
   
   

Most of these questions are extremely important if you want to evaluate any technology solution. They become super important in your recruitment technology implementation because this implementation would not only impact your current employees but also have an impact on your future employees. 

In Conclusion

The recruitment or talent acquisition technology space is the most active space with newer players, innovative approaches and bigger global players in this space. The talent analytics space is just being explored and companies are looking at both internal & external data sources to create innovative products and solutions for companies. We also see a trend for industry specific talent acquisition technology solutions which would address unique needs of that particular industry rather than being a broad-based solution. 

As a business leader or an HR leader or a Talent Acquisition leader, it is very important for you to be able to clearly state your need and business challenge, evaluate available solutions and ensure you are able to track the key business and process metric via the technology. 

In subsequent articles we will look at creating a generic model for evaluation of recruitment technology solutions across various categories and then focus on key and innovative players especially from an SMB perspective. 

How to buy recruitment technology - Part 2